The Importance of Recurring Payments for Merchants
Modern businesses do more than simply make one-off sales of products - they take advantage of the opportunities our digital reality offers. Perhaps the inspiration f...
Are Monolithic Payments a Thing of the Past?
The payment landscape continues to expand each year, offering a vast array of payment methods for end users and processing options for merchants. Payment gateways, p...
Balancing UX and Security in Recurring Payments
Merchants wishing to offer secure payment solutions for customers may find themselves at an impasse: their payment flows may require additional steps to become compl...
B2B SaaS Companies: Avoiding Failed Payments
Failed payments are a key performance indicator for merchants that offer subscription, or installment, payment products or services. That’s because, when a consumer’...
How Subscription Companies Grow Revenue and Reduce Expenses
The subscription model - paying for the use of a product or service on a regular basis, rather than purchasing an item outright - has been around for hundreds of yea...
Decrypting Card Payload for Shopify Payments
When this video was recorded, Shopify Payment App documentation was in its early stages and only depicted Ruby code samples.
MRC Vegas 2024: A Recap
We came back from a long but eventful week at Merchant Risk Council's annual conference in Las Vegas. This year, it ran from March 25 until March 28 and was jam-pack...
A Fintech’s Guide to Payments
What are Fintech Companies? Fintech is a broad term (shortened from financial technology) that encompasses technologies aiming to improve, simplify, or modernize fin...
How To Collect and Store Credit Card Data Securely
When merchants accept credit card payments, they also must consider what happens after the transaction is authorized. Can they store the card data? Should they?
Alternative Payment Methods to Offer Customers
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, it is vital to remove every little bit of friction that can cause a consumer not to complete a purchase. Friction can inc...
Unbundling Payments To Improve Efficiency and ROI
For centuries, payments have been “bundled”. Large multinational institutions have led the way in banking, money, payments, investments, and more, becoming large fin...
How Merchants Can Leverage Social Commerce
In our thoroughly networked world, many are constantly glued to their mobile devices, devouring the musings, postings, and comments that are the lifeblood of social ...
How to Choose A Payment Provider
In today’s digital, virtual world, there are vanishingly few businesses remaining who can operate on a cash basis - everyone has to accept digital payments, like cre...
Payments Data Portability and Interoperability
In a digital and connected world, data is the most valuable virtual commodity. Access to, and control of, data is a fiercely competitive and much-debated area of mod...
Credit Card Processing Levels
Any time a credit card transaction occurs, the payment carries detailed data along with it to better classify and analyze the purchase. The amount and type of data i...
What is Batch Payment Processing?
Merchants use batch payment processing to submit multiple transactions at once, rather than in real-time as the payment details come in, generally to reduce fees and...
What is a Hosted Payment Page? How it Works
When planning to accept payments, integrating and going live quickly can ensure a smooth and swift road to generating revenue. Hosted payment pages can offer merchan...
Merchant Initiated Authentication (3RI) and 3DS
Today’s economy is increasingly driven by complex purchases: beyond the exchange of cash for an item in a retail store, we have become accustomed to making digital o...
How Does Global Payment Processing work?
E-commerce, by its very nature, is international, which opens the door for a global customer base. Opting to accept global payments can ensure that merchants can off...
PayFac vs. ISO: Which Should a Merchant Choose?
In the world of payments, selecting partners to help transact business is one of the most complex, but critical, processes any business can complete. Choosing the ri...
Total Processing Volume (TPV): Why It Matters
Total processing volume (also known as total payment volume, or TPV) is the sum of all payments passed through a specific payment processor over a given period of ti...
Payment Operations: Finding Efficiencies and Cost Savings
As businesses grow, the complexities of keeping up with the money that flows in and out of their accounts start to pile up. The solution is to optimize payment opera...
Dating Apps: Payments Best Practices
Online dating and related services are booming globally, with demand increasing at a rapid pace. The market for online dating and apps was valued at $7.94 billion in...
How Subscription Merchants Can Improve Dunning Management
According to the industry group PYMNTS, failed payments cost subscription merchants as much as 9% - 11% of their revenue. While some of that revenue loss represents ...
Games of Skill Merchants: Payments Best Practices
Companies that fall under the MCC category of “digital games” include the merchants that sell and distribute digital games or game-related products. More specificall...
What is TRID? Learn More About the Token Requestor ID
A token requestor ID (TRID) is a unique identifier that allows merchants to request network tokens from token providers and is a prerequisite for enabling network to...
Negative Option Subscriptions: Payments Best Practices
Negative option merchants are merchants that offer an enticing option for customers, like a free trial, that requires a credit card to sign up. The customer, in turn...
How Stripe and Other Full-Service PSPs Really Make Money
Like so many full-service payment providers, Stripe offers an apparently very simple proposition: run all your payment transactions through their system and pay a si...
What is Triangulation Fraud? How Merchants Can Prevent It
Triangulation fraud is a complicated fraud scheme that occurs, predominantly in ecommerce, between three parties: an unsuspecting customer, a fraudulent seller, and ...
Considerations when Selecting an iFrame Payment Solution
Merchants that want to integrate payments directly into their website or application have several options for doing so, but will often eventually look to iframe (inl...
Vaulted or Vaultless Tokens? Which is Best for Payments?
Tokens: What is a Token Vault? A token is a non-exploitable identifier that references sensitive data. Tokens can take any shape, are safe to expose, and are easy to...
Addressing and Reducing Delinquent Payments
Payments become delinquent when they are not made according to a pre-agreed schedule. Almost by definition, then, they are almost always associated with recurring pa...
The Real Costs of Vaulting Payments
What is Payments Vaulting? Merchants are said to be ‘vaulting payments’ when they contract with a partner, which stores sensitive cardholder data securely and provid...
How Universal Payment Vaults Prevent Payment Failures
What is a Universal Payment Vault? A payment vault is a storage facility where merchants securely manage customer payment details, and transmit them to payment partn...
Payment Fields Best Practices: Capture Lost Revenue
Estimates suggest that somewhere between 36% and 50% of all transactions worldwide are now completed digitally. While this may not come as a surprise to many, what m...
How to Build Your Ideal Payment Stack
Merchants strive to have a seamlessly integrated payment flow for customers. From the outside looking in, many may assume that this is achievable through a light and...
Understanding Frictionless Payments
Frictionless payments offer the least amount of effort to get a transaction closed. There is no universally accepted definition of a frictionless payment, it is more...
How 3DS Affects Merchants and Consumers in the Americas
Why Does 3D-Secure Matter? 3D Secure (3DS) provides an additional layer of security for online transactions, adding an identity confirmation partner to the standard ...
How to Switch PSPs without Re-accepting Credit Cards
Merchants, especially online, have no choice but to contract with at least one payment service provider (PSP) to ensure they can execute transactions with credit car...
How to Reduce Involuntary Churn
In any subscription business, there is inevitably churn - subscribers who end their contract and move on. There is, however, a difference between those who choose to...
High-Risk Payment Processing: High-Performance Merchants
In the first four posts of this five-part series, we covered the rules of payment processing for high risk merchants, what causes processors to shut down merchants, ...
High-Risk Payment Processing: Choosing Multiple PSPs
Sophisticated high-risk merchants understand that de-risking their payments operations can truly be a game changer for their business. They see that not only is it i...
High-Risk Payment Processing: Staying Operational with One PSP
As a high-risk merchant, you know that hedging your risks can make it easier for your business to remain operational. One important way to achieve this when using a ...
5 Steps You can Take to Improve Payments Performance
Why it’s Crucial to Constantly Improve Payments Performance For any business, revenue growth is key to continued development and opportunity. And revenue growth can ...
High Risk Payment Processing: How Are Merchants Shut down?
Operating as a high-risk merchant, one of the most feared experiences is getting shut down. Even the looming threat of this happening is enough to keep many merchant...
High-Risk Payment Processing: The Rules of the Game
This is blog post one of a five-part series on the ins and outs of high-risk merchants and high-risk payment processing.
Processing Costs: Differences in Debit and Credit Cards
How Credit and Debit Cards Compare The fundamental difference between a credit and debit card is whose money is being used in the transaction: with a credit card, th...
AI Solutions to Simplify Payments and Compliance: A Webinar Recap
The Basis Theory team joined a webinar hosted by the Merchant Risk Council (MRC) on November 1 titled “AI Solutions to Simplify Payment Management and Compliance”.
The Payment Settlement Process
What many people miss about the payment process is that there are actually a series of steps - it’s not a one-stop shop! Merchants generally will run some amount of ...
Why are Gift Card Authorization Rates So Low?
Gift card authorization rates are estimated to be 5-10% lower than standard credit card authorization rates. While this can be frustrating for merchants and customer...